This Is Screaming
by Riko Ai Kumagai
Summary: A young girl loses her best friend in a car accident. In her small town, everyone begins to ignore and hate her and this drives her insane. Eventually, she's willing to do anything for the attention.


((ok...I was reading through some RPs that I'd started and found this. I think it's a really good idea, looking back on it, but for a story rather than an RP. So I revised it...It would be too long to put in the whole story so this is a bit of an overview. The main parts of the story are all in there, and a few parts just to give you an idea of where she is and what's kind of happening, and they're seperated.))

"Come on, Alea, let's go...Come on."

"No, no, let's stay, it's way fun here. Come on, don't freak about it so bad."

"No, _come on_-"

It was a Friday night, and school was officially over for summer. It was the summer after eleventh grade. Next year, Rikki Summers would be a senior, along with her best friend Alea Weissman.

The party was getting a bit out of control. Rikki had had a drink or two herself, but nothing like Alea. The girl was completely drunk, and she also had the car keys.

"Just give me the keys, Alea-"

"No, stop it!"

Rikki knew they had to go home. It was late, and they had to go before anything too bad happened. Some of the kids were getting totally out of control.

"Alea!"

"Alright, fine."

The keys made a small clinking noise as they were dropped into Rikki's open palm. She closed her fist around them.

"Thank you. Now let's go."

As the girls made their way to the car, Alea flirted with boys and Rikki glared at them, fixing her black hair.

"Geez...This party got so out of control," Rikki muttered angrily as she slid behind the driver's seat.

"No, wait, I want to drive. Give me the keys," protested Alea suddenly.

Rikki looked at her friend in disbelief for a moment. "You're wasted," she said finally, putting the keys in the ignition and starting up the car. "No way. I'm driving."

"Oh come on! It's my car, let me drive it."

"Stop it, I'm driving. You'll get us both killed if we drive-"

"Rikki, damn, come on!"

But Alea sat down on the passenger's side, crossing her arms in a huff.

As Rikki drove the car down the quiet backstreet, Alea continually made random protests about not being able to drive. After a while, when begging didn't work, she began to reach forward and try to grab the wheel.

"Alea stop it!" Rikki would screech, momentarily petrified.

But Alea would groan and sit back again, only to attempt to do this again.

It was maybe the third time it had happened. Alea reached forward and made a fist around the wheel completely. She pulled it violently sideways, and the car veered.

"Alea!" screamed Rikki, yanking the wheel back, but to no avail. The car was suddenly on the black grass, and then it was going down the small hill that led into the forest, and suddenly it was on its side and then, just as suddenly, there was a hard smashing movement and everything in Rikki's world went dark.

When Rikki came to, the first thing she realized was that she was in a hospital. When she tried to sit up, her arms hurt horribly.

'My...My arms are broken?' she thought sleepily. 'What happened? I can't remember.'

It took a moment until she did. And when she did, it hit her like a brick wall.

"Oh God, Alea! Where is she, where's Alea?!"

Her mother shot up from a chair on the other side of the hospital room to her daughter's side, running her hand through her hair and trying to comfort her, but Rikki would not be silenced until she had her answer; where was Alea?

"Where is she?!" she demanded, her voice breaking in a screech.

"Honey," Rikki's mother said quietly, smiling in her sadness and still running her hand quickly through her child's hair, "Alea's dead."

---

Rikki returned to her small house in her small town from the hospital a few days later, her arms still in casts.

Her already dark eyes were darker, and had so little emotion to them one would have thought the girl was the living dead.

"Welcome home," her father said, pulling the key back from the door and stepping aside.

Rikki walked in, not making any notion to show she even knew that she was home. She made her way straight to her room.

---

It was the first time in about a week that Rikki ventured outside of her house. She lived in one of those towns that when you walked down the street, you'd get someone waving at you and saying, "Why hello, how are you?"

So it was the strangest thing when Rikki, who'd always been a popular girl in her town, was given hateful or angry looks if she wasn't ignored completely, because everyone was completely under the impression that she'd gotten into the car with Alea completely drunk and had driven at an extremely high speed down the road and killed her that way. Rikki would have liked to have been able to say that it hadn't happened that way, but she didn't remember enough from that night to say for sure. Wherever she went, whoever she spoke to, she realized that they had just stopped talking about her and as soon as she left ear shot they would start again.

And as the days went by, people no longer gave her any sort of looks at all. They went on as if they had no idea she was there, like a ghost. Like she had died herself, and now she was invisible and no one cared at all. It didn't take long for this to drive Rikki almost insane.

She'd never known, never considered at all, that being ignored could hurt so badly. That the pain of not being needed by anyone and hated by all was the most deadly poison man had ever created. It was unreal.

And soon Rikki was desperate for attention.

---

It would have been darker that night if the moon had not been glowing so brightly. It reminded her of the night Alea had died. So then, to her, it was a perfect night to do what she planned.

Rikki pulled the gun and slipped it into the back of her jeans. She grabbed a knife, then leaned down so that she was on one knee like a man about to propose to his girlfriend and slipped it into her boot.

"Give me your attention," she whispered, her head being moved with the effort of getting the knife secured. She stared blankly at a wall, her eyes as dead as ever, and her voice was emotionless but seemed close to breaking with tears. "Give it to me. I want it."

She made her way to the park, right in the middle of town. There was quite a bit of people out that night, and it surprised her. But that was only better.

Again, no one noticed her. They continued on their way as if she didn't exist, and it wasn't until she was standing in the direct center of the park and reached back in one smooth motion, pulling out the gun, pointing it directly up at the sky and firing it a few times into the air that everyone paused for a moment. They all realized she was there. Rikki was sure of it; they had to know she was there now, she'd stolen their attention.

But this attention was temporary, and when it was lost it hurt even worse to watch it leave because the attention was running. It was running away now, with screams, and Rikki dropped the gun and spun around, watching these people with perfectly giveable attention running from her.

Her arms hung at her sides and she continued to spin, staring in disbelief at all of these people.

"No," she muttered. "No, why are you doing this? How can you do this can't you see I just want your attention?! Stop running from me! Stop it! I don't want you to run I want you to know that I'm here! Come back here!"

Rikki wasn't sure if she'd said this aloud or not, but no one seemed to hear her, so maybe not.

"No! No stop it! Come back!"

She could hear herself now. And if she could hear herself then these people had to hear her, didn't they? She was screaming at them with all of her might, screaming, screaming for their attention, if these people thought they'd heard screaming before they hadn't because _this_ was screaming, this was called screaming for attention and that was real screaming.

The only people that came to give her attention were the cops. And two of them picked her up, they picked her up from under her arms and lifted her to her feet and began to drag her off, after she'd realized for the final time that no one was going to help her, no one was going to give her the attention she needed. There was no one who cared, no one who wanted to care. She realized this for the final time, and this was the time that was true- these people had heard her scream for attention but they'd ignored it. So there was truly no one in the world who cared.


End file.
